Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

What was especially ironic was that part of what had attracted me to Mike was his plans, this unrealized potential that I found adorable and anchoring. When we were in college, he would talk about traveling and seeing the world together, about the family we would raise. When we were married, he made promises about putting shelves in the garage or putting a rose bed in the backyard. Neither of those ever materialized. He was always going on about his boat, this little sixteen-foot wooden sailboat that he had been building for the last five years. When we were at parties or holidays or any gathering where there were more than two people, he waxed poetic about his connection to the water, how a man could only master a vessel he’d built himself, until I wanted to gouge my ears with a shrimp fork. He spent thousands of dollars on tools and materials, despite the fact that he’d never completed so much as a birdhouse. So far, he had the basic structure of the hull, which he’d assembled in the first year. He hadn’t added anything to it since. So pardon me if I no longer believed his boat was going to be anything more than some sort of nautical dinosaur skeleton in his workshop.

Unless it related to the business, these things never seemed to get done if Mike was left to his own devices. In fact, even though it was for the business, Mike couldn’t be bothered to write his monthly office newsletter. Every month I dutifully wrote it, laid it out on seasonal stationery, and trudged down to the bulk mail office to ship it to hundreds of Mike’s family, friends, and clients. Part public relations, part brag sheet, part actual business correspondence, it was chock-full of vital information, such as “Lacey is learning to crochet, badly. She’s either making a tablecloth or a very large potholder.” For some reason, our friends and family seemed to love the fact that I made fun of myself while promoting Mike’s firm.

I’d suggested that we switch to an electronic format to save paper and postage. I’d even gathered the vast majority of the recipients’ e-mail addresses in a spreadsheet and loaded them into E-mail Expo, an online marketing service that allowed users to design mass messages using ready-made templates. It would have meant the difference between my spending two hours or two days every month on the newsletter. But Mike was afraid of alienating his older, less techno-savvy clients, so I just kept buying that stupid themed stationery. It became another thing I was expected to do to make Mike’s life easier.

He loved the idea of the report. He loved the friendly personal touch with the clients and what it did for the business. He just didn’t want to have to do it himself.

It was now 4:24 p.m. Mike was due home in an hour. I had a roast in the oven and it would dry out it if I didn’t check on it in the next ten minutes. But the idea of getting out of bed was a mountain I was not prepared to climb.

“Get up,” I muttered to myself. “Get up.”

But my limbs stayed where they were, leaden, tired, stubborn. Maybe I would lie here long enough to die and Mike would have to explain the soggy, woebegone corpse in his master suite.

After convincing myself that I didn’t want to be found dead in my bathrobe, I crawled back into the shower, running it on cool to try to take the swelling down in my face. I looked into the little shatterproof shaving mirror and swiped at my eyes, which seemed to be a little less puffy. I didn’t like having the mirror in our shower because the suction cups left weird little soap-scum circles on the glass door. But Mike insisted that his mornings would be much easier if he could just shave in the shower, so I’d spent the better part of an afternoon hunting down the best mirror I could find. Just like I’d spent countless afternoons doing countless stupid little errands because they were important to Mike. I’d wasted most of my twenties doing his stupid little errands.

Somewhere in my stomach, the tight, miserable little ball of tension bubbled to my lips in the form of: “Asshole!” I screamed, yanking the mirror off the door and throwing it against the wall. “How could you fucking do this to me, you miserable, dickless piece of shit!”

I picked up the mirror again and brought it crashing down on the floor, stomping on it, doing my best to break it. But the damn thing was shatterproof. I was just making noise, empty, stupid pointless noise that no one would hear. I slid down the tile wall, collapsing in a heap on the floor.

I wasn’t going to cry anymore. I was tired of making empty noise.

I blew a shallow breath through my teeth and pushed to my feet, putting my face under the cool spray. I wondered how close Mike was to the house. Was he actually coming home tonight or did he have another “meeting”? Either way, I didn’t want him to find me like this. I needed time, to think, to decide, to plan. I needed focus to keep myself from knocking him out the minute he walked through the door and supergluing his dick to the wall.

“Get up, you giant cliché,” I said, my voice stern, cold. “Get up. Get your ass out of this shower and stop re-enacting scenes from every Lifetime movie ever made. Get up. Get up. Get up!”

I sat up, brushing the wet, snaggled hair out of my face. “Now brush your damn teeth.”

I am an emotional person. It’s one of the reasons Mike said I would never make a decent accountant. (That and needing a calculator to perform long division.) Mike was always in control of his emotions. Though, not apparently, in control of his penis. He would not expect me to remain calm, cool, and unaffected in the face of his pantsless office hijinks.

So I got up, got dressed, and waited. I smiled when Mike managed to make it home for dinner and served him pot roast. I told him about my Junior League meeting that morning and acted like the problems we were having printing this year’s charity cookbook were the biggest worries on my mind. And I slept beside him, having to concentrate hard to prevent myself from smothering him with the pillow.

It was the last thing he would see coming. The calm thing, I mean, not the smothering. Though he probably wouldn’t see the pillow coming either.

In my weaker moments, I considered forgetting this whole thing and staying with him. For one thing, you can’t discount eight years of history. My parents were very fond of him. My parents and his parents seemed to enjoy spending time together, a rare and precious coincidence that meant I never had to split my holidays. And Mike was safe. He was stable. Apart from the receptionist-screwing, he had been a decent husband to me. I didn’t have to worry about bills being paid or him drinking too much or watching an alarming amount of Sports Center.

We’d made a life together. It wasn’t perfect, but I was proud of what we’d built. Even if he’d smashed it all to hell by betraying the unspoken rule I thought we’d both agreed to - don’t have sex with other people.

And at other, angrier moments, I found my hands gripping the edge of the kitchen table as I stared at my husband. Mike had retained the blond, boyish good looks that had drawn me to him when we were seniors in high school. The sun-streaked sandy blond hair that curled just at the ends. The guileless brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. The little cleft in his chin that his mama called “God’s thumbprint.”

Mike was equally tense. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. His knee was bouncing steadily under the table, a sure sign he was nervous about something. He didn’t even complain about our dinner menu of blackened catfish and Mama’s “Light Your Fire” cheese grits. Mike hated spicy food with a passion. He treated Taco Bell like exotic third-world cuisine.

I said I was trying to behave as normally as possible. I didn’t say I was a saint.